Many furniture products, including such products as chairs, sofas and automobile seats utilize sinuous wire spring elements as to create resilient surfaces, such as seats and backrests, in an item of furniture. Such resilient spring elements are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,263,573. Each resilient sinuous spring element has a plurality of straight bar portions joined by a plurality of connecting or curved or radiused portions. Generally, these sinuous spring elements are manufactured on a machine which produces a quantity of identical sinuous springs, each sinuous spring having the same number of straight bar portions and the same radius in its curved portions. Therefore, each resilient sinuous spring element has the same length. The machine had to be stopped and adjusted to manufacture sinuous spring elements of different lengths. Prior to the present invention, in order to adjust the length of the resultant sinuous spring element, one had to stop the operation of the machine and make the necessary adjustments to the machine. Upon restarting the machine, a different size resilient sinuous spring element would be produced. Each time a different length of resilient sinuous spring element was desired, the operator had to stop the machine, adjust the machine and then restart the machine. Each time the operator stopped the machine, the machine was not producing resilient sinuous spring elements. This reduced the output of the machine and required skilled operators to properly adjust the machine.
Therefore, it is one objective to the present invention to provide a machine for manufacturing sinuous spring elements which does not have to be stopped or turned off in order to change the length of the resilient sinuous spring element produced by the machine.
It is another objective of the present invention to provide an apparatus for use on a machine used to make sinuous spring elements which enables the machine to produce sinuous spring elements of different lengths without turning off the machine.
It is another objective of the present invention to maintain a desired length of sinuous spring despite changes in machine speed and/or changes to the wire being introduced into the machine.